9 Sep
2010
9 Sep
'10
2:01 a.m.
On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 10:30:13AM -0500, Brent Busby wrote:
On Fri, 3 Sep 2010, Arvind Venkatasubramanian wrote:
Yep. The drummer in Better Than Lahar plays with only one rack tom and one floor tom. When
I was mixing our CD (in Ardour, of course!), I noticed a passage where he did a quick
16th-note tom run across all four toms. Wait, what? Four? He has only two! It turned out
that by skillfully hitting only ONE tom (the rack) in different places on the head and
with different levels of force, he got four distinct pitches out of that one drum.
He's a funk drummer, but he studied jazz at university, and it shows.
Brent: Very Interesting. But that's the
skill of trained drummers to
control the bandwidth of the spectrum by their playing skills. In the
subjective memory music, if I listen to a note in a melody or
percussion just 5 seconds back, I can have control over sound level,
if I want to change sound level and pitch control, if I want pitch
control.
But after 10 minutes, I cannot do that. But from what you say, a
drummer can do it anytime he wants because he is actually tweaking the
matter (waveFORM) and not accessing (his?) mind.
It's really something he's doing in the listener's mind though, not his
own. When you play louder, simplistically speaking, you're not really
raising pitch. (I say simplistically, because sometimes actually you
are: Hitting a drumhead harder can actually momentarily increase its
tuning tension, but that's not always what's going on. Most of it
really is the subject effect I'm talking about.) The drummer is taking
advantage of the way people tend to hear higher volumes as higher
pitches.
I'm thinking probably it's just another manifestation of the same
phenomenon in the way you remember melodies after some time passes.